2026/05/01 by Ángel Aedo · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Feminism, Gender, and Social Issues #Migration, Education, Indigenous Social Dynamics #Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America
paper · doi:10.17141/iconos.85.2026.6898
openalex publication_date 2026/05/01 · openalex created_date 2026/05/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This article examines how regimes of exception – both formally declared and operating de facto – produce differentiated conditions of exposure to violence among specific youth populations in Chile, giving rise to dynamics of youthcide, understood as processes of prolonged social erosion. The research adopts a comparative qualitative approach, focusing on two empirical settings: Mapuche territories in southern Chile subjected to sustained militarization and socioeconomically marginalized urban neighborhoods in Santiago characterized by intensive police presence. The analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork, multi-source documentary analysis, human rights reports, and specialized scholarly literature. The findings show that violence is enacted through the articulation of direct coercion, sustained surveillance, and preventive criminalization, mediated by institutional dispositifs, legal frameworks, and securitizing discourses that normalize exceptionality as an ordinary mode of intervention upon certain youth bodies. Against this backdrop, the article identifies practices of collective persistence, such as hunger strikes, community-based rituals, child protection networks, and self-managed spaces of care, aimed at sustaining collective life under conditions of constant pressure. It concludes that while these practices do not dismantle the punitive logics that produce them, they do limit their most destructive effects and enable processes of social and community re-composition in contexts of persistent marginalization.